And they were entirelybone.
Vesper retreated, but the Graver snatched the cup from his grasp. Before Vesper could stop him, the Graver dipped its finger into the clotted blood and brought it to its grotesque mouth. Its long black tongue slithered out and lapped up the blood in several thirsty strokes.
Bloody fucking Hollow. What kind of messed up morbid mosquito shit was that?
Thorrin clapped a hand over his mouth and not-so-subtly gagged. Kyrith shot up from the bench and backed away as if she’d just witnessed the Graver slit someone’s throat and dance on their fucking corpse. Gaelen and Dimitri sat silent as the dead, shock written across their faces like Nef.
“Fascinating,” the Graver hissed. “Your blood whispers many things.”
An icy chill slithered through Vesper’s veins. He yanked his glove back on, and his fingers rested on a dagger from his belt. Because nothing about this felt right. Absolutely fuckingnothing.
Maybe Arborius had tricked them. Dragons couldn’t lie, but all he had told them was that they would find answers here. Nothowthey would. That conniving little shit. He should havenevertrusted him.
Kyrith’s fingers tapped against the handle of her blade, as if she asked it a question, because each drum seemed to hold words. As her sword’s unsettling buzz grew to a screech, it seemed to say only one thing.
Wrong.
Nef’s face turned an oceanic green and she cleared her throat, before she blurted, “I need some air.”
In a flurry, she rushed past Vesper and exited the tent. As he watched her go, he wanted to follow, but he couldn’t leave without answers. Even so, his attention warred between Nef and the Graver.
Vesper locked eyes with Dimitri’s warm brown gaze and nodded his head toward the exit in a silent request. Abruptly, Dimitri stood to chase after Nef.
The Graver’s attention didn’t waver from Vesper. “You are here to request answers for your sister? To retrieve her soul from where it is kept?”
How the Graver could discern that from his blood, Vesper didn’t want to fucking know. But either way, he nodded and replied, “I’ve seen her in my dreams. She doesn’t know why she’s there. Doesn’t know how to leave.”
“Her soul does not reside in the Divide.” The Graver swirled his skeletal finger in the cup then popped it into his mouth andsucked the blood from it, followed by a muffled moan. “It is elsewhere. I cannot see it.”
Vesper stomach dropped. This hunt for information was becoming an absolutely ridiculous game of cat and mouse.
Evidently, he was the bloody rodent.
“Well then,whereis it?” Vesper demanded, his words sharp as blades. “You said if I gave my blood you would have answers. I’m not an idiot. I’veseenher there. I spoke to Zyphira, and she—”
A wet chuckle rattled from the back of the Graver’s throat. “Zyphira knows nothing. She speaks in riddles.” It tipped back the cup and guzzled the remaining coagulated blood in a stomach-curling slurp. “You have only seen your sister’s soul. Her mirror.”
Vesper’s hands balled into fists. He wanted to punch the stupid tent wall and take down the whole thing. “You need to tell me how to bring her back. And why I could see her before and now I suddenly can’t.”
The Graver’s eyelids blinked over its empty chasms. “You cannot retrieve what is not lost. And only those who have tasted the inky shadows of death can enter the Divide. Those who enter without, must consume decay in other ways.”
As the realization struck him, Vesper couldn’t get any fucking air into his lungs. Hehadtasted those shadows. In fact, he’d drowned in them when he had bled out on that blasted tile floor in Deimos’s mausoleum.
The Graver stood. “I speak the truth. She is irretrievable.”
The cold slap of reality morphed into something hideous. Something dangerous and desperate and absolutely feral.
Vesper stalked toward the Graver, ready to rip out his throat for his trickery. He slammed his fist down on the table so hard he sent a few cups and loose papers flying. “That’s not good enough!”
Thorrin’s hand circled Vesper’s forearm and tugged him back. Vesper panted, his vision blurred as his world crumpled around him.
“We need answers on the…” Thorrin started, but he choked on his words as the Graver turned its eyeless stare on him. “The pestilence infecting our land. The bloodlace. We wish to know its origins, and, more importantly, how to be rid of it.”
The Graver licked its long, pointed black tongue over its lips. “It is not for me to say. All I can say is Deimos is not the start. Nor is he the end.”
Thorrin clasped his hands together to hide the quake in them. “Then how do we rid it? And how do we help those infected by it?”
“You do not.”